An Expat's Guide to Cooking: OG Mac n Cheese

Sunday, 8 July 2018

Moving to a new country takes a lot of adjustment. You're introduced to new people, new foods, and new languages. Adapting to a new country is a massive adjustment. Sometimes you have to adjust to the culture while still keeping a bit of your own. After many talks with a lot of expats, for some reason adapting to food seems to be one of the most challenging. The top two foods I hear constant feedback about: Mexican and Mac n Cheese. So today we have a fabulous guest post, from my friend Nick, for all you expats looking to make some killer mac n cheese in Australia (without breaking the bank to get your hands on some Velveeta).

Mac n Cheese: The Velveeta Famine

So, coming in to contact with many expats over the last few years, I’ve noticed that there is one major hurdle that all of you people seem to struggle with when moving overseas: Velveeta Goddamn cheese.

What this post aims to do, is teach those of you poor, homesick individuals that not being able to easily access this dead-shit “cheese” product is not the end of the world by sharing an OG Mac n Cheese recipe.

First off, you’re going to make a Bechamel sauce, Bechamel is French and roughly translates to “How much cheese can I render down into the heaviest concentrate possible?” or something like that.

Heat butter in a pan when bubbling mix in the flour, Whisk until you develop a sexy golden roux slowly pour in a cup of milk, constantly whisking to incorporate it until you have a gravy-like consistency. Then add your cheese, only 110g/4oz of the Parmesan, the rest is used on top. The only real cheese you need to keep regardless of your taste is Parmesan, you can use jack or whatever ungodly concoction you see fit to match your horrible personality. Keep adding until it’s all combined and as thick as a Kardashian’s grey matterAdd cracked pepper and salt to taste.

Meanwhile, we’re going to address another sore point amongst the community: Bacon.

Bacon is for burgers and to have on top of pancakes. We’re making neither today, so for this exercise, say “fuck bacon” to yourself and go get some Pancetta. Pancetta is an OG cured pork that makes bacon look like the cooking equivalent of the Cleveland Browns. The difference being is it’s salt cured instead of smoke cured like bacon. Which means two things: It’s got a stronger flavour and required to be cooked to fuck before consuming to prevent the spread of gross pork germs.

You can find it literally anywhere if you look hard enough, IGA, any weekend market. But if you’re too goddamn lazy to take 20 minutes out of your day going to your local markets, I’m sure you could dig it up at Woolworths or Coles. I’ve never tried. But you do you boo.

Slice it up into little lardettes and fry it until it’s all crispy and shit. Take it out and set it aside. Now you’ll notice that it’s a lot fattier than bacon and will leave a substantial amount of greasy goodness in the pan. Get your panko breadcrumbs and whack them into the fatty, juicy goodness. Brown the breadcrumbs until they resemble that god awful Pittsburgh Steelers throwback uniform and put aside to cool. Now instead of having boring breadcrumbs you’ve got bacon-y (pancetta-y?) awesome toasted breadcrumbs.

Mix your pasta (Do I have to tell you to cook the pasta? Of course you have to cook the damn pasta.) in with your bitchin’ cheese sauce and mix until everything is lathered and sexy. Then add your crispy Pancetta awesome and mix that in too.

Put it all into a baking tray and cover with your breadcrumbs and another horrendously large amount of Parmesan. Cover it, put it into the oven at 230 degrees Celcius (450F, assimilate people for crying out loud) for about 10 minutes, uncovering and continuing to cook for another 15 minutes. Pull it out. And enjoy breaking through that ridiculous layer of cheese and greasy breadcrumbs like you would a motherfucking creme brulee.

Post photos of it on Instagram, eat an embarrassingly large amount to yourself and scoff arrogantly the next time one of your other countrymen complains about not being able to get that godforsaken crappy, aluminium coated block of sin called Velveeta.

Pro Tip: Add finely chopped parsley to the finished product to garnish, because we all know that the only purpose parsley has in its miserable existence is to make garbage food look like it’s got its shit together.

If you’re still unhappy, you can always find Velveeta at your local American foods store and pay $15 a block. Because quite frankly, you deserve it.